Sharks looking for ninth straight home win, three lineup changes in store, McLellan on the leadership situation — plus the Dillon-Vancouver connections

SAN JOSE – Look for changes in the lineup tonight when the Sharks try to erase the memories of those losses in Anaheim and Los Angeles with a ninth straight win at the SAP Center.

It won’t be easy to keep that home streak going as the Vancouver Canucks provide the opposition. Both teams have 43 points – as do Los Angeles and Calgary in an amazingly tight Pacific Division race. That topic was covered in an online story filed earlier and you can read it here .

The current winning streak followed a stretch where the Sharks were playing below .500 at home and losing to several of the NHL’s bottom-dwellers. Couple that with the Game 7 loss in the playoffs, and McLellan was asked if he thought the energy levels that historically made this building tough on visiting teams was starting to come back.

“When you don’t win, some of that does get away from you,” he said, “but the strong teams have a real swagger and belief that they’re going to win at home and they prepare that way. They jump on top of teams, they get their fans involved in the game early and we didn’t do a good job of that at the beginning of the season. It took us awhile to get people involved. We’ve been better in that area and I think that also is a factor in our turnaround.”

To end his team’s mini-skid, Sharks coach Todd McLellan is making three lineup changes, all of which were pretty easy to see coming.

Alex Stalock will be in goal and what with San Jose playing Wednesday night in Anaheim, you knew Antti Niemi was going to get one of those nights off. Matt Irwin will replace Scott Hannan on the blue line, and though all the talk this morning was about Irwin earning this shot after being scratched for eight games, the fact Hannan had a bad night in that loss to Los Angeles telegraphed this move, too.

The third change is the return of Matt Nieto to the lineup. McLellan had made it clear that Nieto was going to get a spot as soon as he had fully rehabbed that ankle injury and the time is now. Interestingly, Nieto starts out on the fourth line with Andrew Desjardins and Micheal Haley. McLellan’s explanation and more is found in another online story filed earlier and available here .

I follow the logic, but I won’t be too surprised if Nieto ends up elsewhere before the night is over.

****This morning McLellan was asked by the visiting media about how things have been working with the new leadership arrangement. Did he let the veteran players set the bar or did he knock on the door occasionally?

“We knock on the door. The performance bar, the expectations have to be set by the coaching staff. We have to set what we expect is realistic and we have to hold them accountable and that has to filter on through. The four assistant captains, the guys who wear A’s are a big part of it, but there’s a group of players that are included in that leadership group that are confided in and given direction at times from us as a staff.

“I like the way it’s worked. It hasn’t been smooth, it hasn’t been just free-wheeling from the beginning of the season. We went through controversy, we went through bad times. But the group has stuck together and everyone seems to have stepped up at times to this point, which is important.”

Is it his longevity with the team – this is his seventh season — that enables him to know when to open that door?

“The relationships coaches create with players allow them to set boundaries on how far and how hard you can push, individually and collectively. The players know when you’re out of character and I know when they’re out of character. We’ve been together that long. That’s why the leadership group with the coaches includes has worked to this point. I don’t know if it will continue to work or not, but we’ll find that out.”

****Finally, tonight’s game is a special one for Sharks defenseman Brenden Dillon for reasons that go beyond the two points at stake.

For one thing, Dillon grew up in the Vancouver suburbs and had a lot of cameras and microphones focused on him after the morning skate. For another, Dillon has credited his minor league coach for being a major factor in his development as an undrafted player, and that minor league coach was Willie Dejsardins, now running the Canucks bench.

“He’s a great young man,” Desjardins said when I asked him about Dillon. “I got to see him out of junior, watch him a little bit before we signed him. He’s just such a quality person besides being a really good player. . . . . He plays it hard, he plays it the right way. It doesn’t surprise me that he’s playing well here.”

David Pollak

David Pollak has been following the NHL forever and at the Mercury News as an editor or reporter since 1987. For almost a decade he wrote about the Sharks as the paper's Fan in the Stands before joining the sports department in 2001. He became the Sharks beat writer before the 2007-08 season and began this blog at that time. You can also follow him on Twitter at @PollakOnSharks.